Game Crafter – DIY online game maker fun for all the family

Game Crafter is a new online games making service and portal. Got a great idea for a game? Think you could do something better than Monopoly? Then this is your chance. The site contains everything you’ll need to construct a game, including templates for board layouts, playing card decks and cover art. Upload all the materials, assemble them and design your game box and you’re set to go. You set the price of the game, and the profit (price – manufacturing costs) is shared 50/50 between you and the site. It’s really kind of a CafePressor Lulu for games.

The interesting part is the online shop, which acts as a gallery for the games and is part of the sales promotion that you get when you sign up for the service as a game maker. It’s all pretty cool. The site even offers a cost estimator so you can tell whether your vision is commercially viable or not. Nice.

Why does TGC get 50% of the profit? In the adventure/board game industry it is standard that the distributor of a game takes 30% of the game’s sale price, and the retailer takes 40% of its price. That leaves the original game designer with only 30% left for profit. By those numbers alone we’ve already beat the amount of profit you’d get in the industry… In addition, if you were to go to India or China you’d have to purchase 2,000 to 5,000 copies of your game at minimum. And then you’d have to store those copies somewhere until you can sell them…